Program and public policy

The NCCHPP produced a Scan of Mental Health Strategies1 to show what is being developed in the field of population mental health across Canada. This Scan provides an overview of mental health and wellness and related strategies through comparative tables and summaries, with a particular emphasis on work related to the promotion of mental health and the prevention of mental illnesses.

The policy brief is a knowledge transfer tool that has increasingly been used in recent years as a way to inform or influence public policy decisions. Because policy briefs are designated by a variety of terms (e.g.: policy note, research snapshot, etc.) and prepared in various formats, it can be difficult to determine how to go about writing one. What exactly is it? What criteria should be met to produce a high quality document? Which writing guides are of interest?

What is an effective way to share public health knowledge with the municipal sector? In this document, we present the views expressed by civil servants in Canadian municipalities.

When public health actors wish to share knowledge in order to influence municipal policies that have an impact on health, they may wonder how to do this. Here are several questions that they might ask:

This document is part of a series of documents, webinars, and workshops on wicked problems developed by the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP). It is meant to highlight key factors and resources for dealing with wicked problems and to offer readers some practical examples for how these may be addressed. Our hope is that it will be useful to public health actors by helping to focus their approach to the specific problems their organizations are faced with and by…

This briefing note, by Paul Cairney of the University of Stirling, presents the importance of distinguishing between uncertainty and ambiguity in the strategies aimed to develop evidence-informed policy making.

Policy studies often distinguish between uncertainty, defined as a lack of knowledge about a policy problem or its solution, and ambiguity, defined as the potential to produce more than one interpretation of a problem. With this in mind, reducing uncertainty can be thought of…

The purpose of this document is to equip public health actors to conduct a critical and nuanced ethical analysis of public health policies or population-based interventions accused or suspected of being paternalistic.

To deepen understanding of paternalism and help public health actors conduct this type of ethical analysis, this document has been structured around five main questions: 

Acute alcohol poisoning occurs frequently in Québec. Between January 1 and November 26, 2017, provincial emergency rooms admitted 2,332 young people age 12–24 for acute alcohol poisoning. That is equivalent to 214 cases per month, 49 cases per week, or 7 cases per day.

These cases are serious. One quarter of young people age 12–24 admitted to the emergency room at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Sherbrooke for alcohol-related problems had a priority level…

This report is the result of a mandate from the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS) [Québec’s ministry of health and social services] to produce a knowledge synthesis focused on nine courses of action which pertain to “illicit” psychoactive substances and which have not been implemented, or have been implemented only on a limited scale or as a pilot project in Québec.

The nine courses of action are:

The issues related to access to firearms go well beyond the use of these weapons in criminal activities. Access to firearms is an important risk factor for suicide, homicide, particularly spousal homicide, and accidental death.

Most firearm-related deaths are not linked to criminal activities and involve long guns